Thanksgiving is now past and Christmas is barreling towards us!
Mike and I went downtown on Saturday evening and walked around the mall. It was SO nice to be able to park in the parking garage under the mall and not have to walk there since it was cold and windy. It felt like the definition of luxury! 🙂
We didn’t buy very much, but we enjoyed wandering around and looking at all the Christmas lights in the mall.
The mall gearing up for Christmas!
Look at all that hustle and bustle! There was also a band of three steel drum players who sounded so amazing inside the mall’s front lobby… I just loved listening to them while we walked around the mall.
When we got hungry we stopped to eat at the Nordstrom Cafe to eat and I took the opportunity to snap a couple pictures of Mike and me.
Ta-da! Eating at Nordstrom
Here’s a picture Mike took with this cool iPhone lens adapter he got:
Christmas lights at the mall
Here’s an adorable picture he took of Piper with the same lens. 😉
Cuteness overload!
Around 8:30pm Mike suggested we go see the new Lincoln movie starring Daniel Day Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, and that guy who’s been in most action movies that came out last year (Gordon Levitt or something like that). We had to wait an hour for a showing at the theater on the top floor of the mall, but it was fine because we just wandered around and looked at stores. Everything was decorated so festively for Christmas.
Lincoln was a very well-done movie. I would be very interested to know much of it was historically accurate and how much literary license they used to write the script. It definitely painted politics in those days as being a pretty corrupt arena. It was very interesting, though, and definitely gave me more insight into that time period. Everyone seems to think Daniel Day Lewis will get an Oscar for his performance, so we’ll see!
Also, ladies and gentleman… we finally got internet at the new apartment! Mike had the Friday after Thanksgiving off of work, so while I went to work he stayed there and waited for the cable guy to come and hook everything up. I was reasonably excited. Being able to type on a keyboard bigger than the touchscreen of an iPhone again sounded very exciting. However, Mike texted me around 9:30 and said the cable guy was there but none of the wires in the electrical room were labeled correctly and they were all messed up. What was supposed to happen is that the third floor electrical room was supposed to contain the wires for the third floor apartments. In actuality, there were wires for fifth floor apartments in the third floor wire room, and the cable guy wasn’t able to find out wires. Apparently, he was recommending that we get the maintenance guy in there to find the wires and then the cable guy said he’d come back to hook it up.
Well. Somehow I knew it was going to be too easy to get internet. What’s life (especially internet life) without a few snags along the way?
Mike texted me a picture of the wire room. It was pretty awful. Mike said the cable guy was angry, and Mike himself was appalled. Just when I had given up hope of getting internet for the forseeable future (or at least until Mike could sort through hundreds of black wires, all of them unlabeled), Mike texted me that he and the cable guy had found our wire.
Yay! The hookup process after that went smoothly.
So Mike is moved in to the new apartment now. He doesn’t have all of his stuff yet, though… he’s been moving it bit by bit. It’s taking a long time to get all of his music and electronics stuff packed up, but he’s getting there.
There are definitely going to be adjustments with the whole living in the same apartment situation. His first day at the new apartment, he was getting some ice water and left the freezer door open while he shook ice cubes into his glass. Then he put the ice cube tray back in the freezer empty. I cringed. I knew he did that. And that was ok when he was in his own apartment. But now I said, “Mike, you can’t put the empty ice cube tray back in the freezer. You have to fill it first. And we’re wasting electricity if we leave the freezer door open while we’re getting ice cubes.”
He looked at me mischievously and said, “So it begins.”
I had to laugh, but then literally two minutes later, he asked if he could plug his iPhone charger into my surge protector.
“What surge protector? I don’t have a surge protector.”
“What?? What’s your iPhone charger plugged into?”
“The wall.”
Mike got down on his knees and looked behind my nightstand to see my iPhone charger, because apparently he didn’t believe it was possible to plug an iPhone charger into the wall. (I can totally vouch for its ability to plug into the wall socket, never having plugged it into anything else.) Mike cringed. He slowly got up and turned to face me and shook his head. “Karen. This is unacceptable.”
I laughed at him. “So it begins!”
It’s interesting. We haven’t discovered anything new about each other, but the things that were fine to deal with when we lived in separate apartments are a bigger deal when we’re in the same apartment.
On the plus side, I bought a print of a cool picture I’ve always liked, and he hung it on the wall for me. He never would have picked out a picture, and I never would have hung it on the wall. His dishes are getting washed regularly (previously he left silverware in his sink so long it started to rust… not kidding here). He got a grommet to keep the shower caddy in the bathroom from falling on my head (What in the world kind of thing is a “grommet” anyway… I mean who has ever heard of that? I had no idea what a grommet was, much less that one could be used to keep the annoyingly unstable shower caddy in place). So there’s some mutually beneficial stuff going on in addition to the inevitable arguments over smaller things. 🙂
Piper is loving having Mike around. She alternates between his lap and my lap but never wants to be too far from at least one of us. We tried to give her a little turkey fat on Thanksgiving, but she wasn’t at all interested. Apparently the little savage only eats raw meat.
I realize I have completely skipped over our Whole Foods Thanksgiving dinner, but you can rest assured that it was good, just like last year. And the year before. Maybe next year I’ll actually get wild and crazy and try to make a turkey myself. In the meantime, I’ve got the Whole Foods meal routine pretty well down. I understand what to microwave, what goes in the oven, and how long each thing takes.
Mike carving the turkey… it’s awesome to have a kitchen island!
See our little rosemary tree in the background? We just planted that in the little garden we have on top of our apartment building on Sunday… so hopefully it lives till spring and I can get lots of fragrant rosemary for my cooking! 🙂
I hope everyone else’s Thanksgiving was full of love and peace! Mike and I wish we could have spent it with family and friends, but you all know we’re sending love your way! Special hugs to those three girls, Mabel, Cora, and Penny, who are getting prettier and sweeter by the week if Facebook pictures are to be believed! 🙂
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